Imp grabbed the handle of the small door at the back of the library and twisted. “It’s locked!”
“Shift.” Wendy pushed him aside. “In or out?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Out,” said the Gammon, raising his gun to cover the front entrance from behind a trolley laden with unsorted volumes waiting to be reshelved.
“Good call.” Wendy’s hands were suddenly filled with a battering ram. “A hand here?”
“What do I do?” Doc took the weight of the rear of the ram.
“Count of three: one … two … three … go!” Together they swung the ram at the doorknob. The door splintered around the lock as it crashed open, revealing an unlit staircase leading down past shelves of supplies.
Imp directed: “Into the basement, everyone except Game Boy and Del. Remember the book won’t kill anyone unless they take it without permission. We’ll wait near the exit and follow the trail of bodies.”
“Fucksake,” grated Del, melting into the shadows near the spiral staircase. A moment later Game Boy emerged and lay prone atop one of the bookcases, face to the wall. In the torchlit twilight he resembled a decorative molding. Del followed him, taking up a symmetrical position on the other side of the room.
“Good luck to you, too,” Eve said coolly. Del flipped her off as Imp and Doc trotted down the stairs. There was another crash from the other end of the room and the table lurched inward as their assailants tried to ram the front doors. Eve glanced at Franke: “Remember, we need to make it look good, but at least one of them has to survive.”
“You know it’s risky, ma’am?”
“Don’t talk to me about risk: I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since he was born.” She jerked her chin at the cellar door, where Imp had just vanished into the shadows.
Franke focussed on the table blocking the entrance. “Here they come,” he breathed, switching from flashlight to laser sight. A red firefly danced across the underside of the table. “In three, two—” Glass shattered high above them; gaslight caught the tumble of two canisters to the middle of the floor. “Grenades!” snapped the Gammon. “Get out!”
He squeezed off a short burst at the back of the door just as the front doors crashed inwards and the two canisters hit the tiles. “Cover!” he shouted. Eve’s halo of glass marbles shimmered and erupted towards the doorway as the Gammon fired three more rounds and darted back into the basement stairwell. Eve was close on his heels: she pushed the damaged door shut behind them moments before a brilliant light and concussion lit up the room and the gunmen stormed in.
ACQUISITIONS AND TAKEOVERS
I am not paid enough for this shit, the Bond thought disgustedly, as fog swirled around his ankles. He bent over the body at his feet, probed with two fingers above the stiff blue collar. The unconscious constable’s pulse held steady. Fuck. He reached down with his other hand, grabbed the man’s chin, and yanked hard until he felt the cervical vertebrae grind. In the distance, wooden rattles clattered like knucklebones in a graveyard crypt, converging on the Whitechapel rookery.
The cop had nearly iced him, and it would have been entirely his own fault that he’d fallen to an amateur. He’d been so busy reloading and focussing on the headbangers with the full auto kit that he’d nearly missed the double-barrelled shotgun sneaking up behind him. Loss of situational awareness was a perennial problem, and—he froze, alerted by the sound of a different caliber of automatic weapon opening up.
Well, fuck this for a game of toy soldiers. Stalking Miss Starkey’s clown crew was one thing. Taking on a goon squad with AKs was another. Throwing feral Victorian cops toting shotguns on their home turf into the mix was something else again—and now some joker was lighting up the night with a machine pistol. Nope, this mission’s a bust. Four groups stalking each other in the fog: What is this, a fucking Peter Pan pantomime? All it needed was a crocodile scuttling around with a ticking bomb in its stomach, leatherbound death on four legs. It didn’t matter how good you were; if enough bullets were flying, you could catch one in the neck purely at random. This was shaping up to be a total shit-show, and the Bond was acutely aware that he was hanging his ass out here without backup.
Oh well. Someone else could get their hands wet collecting the consignment. They’d have to come back to the house if they wanted to get home, and when they did, he’d be waiting for them.
The Bond kept his back to the wall as he stole away from the firefight at the front of the reading room. There was a crash of breaking glass as something whizzed out through a skylight and disappeared into the night: they were fighting inside the building now. Another hiss, and someone screamed above his head, then fell off the building and hit the cobblestones with a meaty thud. A grenade exploded round the front, the blast muffled by the mist. It sounded like a pitched battle.
An alleyway over, a corner turned, and the screams and percussion ebbed as if they were a distant memory of another world. But the wooden rattles were still audible, coming closer. The mist parted briefly, affording the Bond a glimpse of two burly figures in police helmets and capes. Unfortunately, it also gave them a glimpse of him. “Stop in the name of the law!” shouted one of the constables. “’E’s the Ripper!” shrieked an unseen woman. The Bond winced and dived into the next street as the clatter of a policeman’s rattle echoed off the walls behind him.
The gunfire and explosions cut off abruptly as he rounded the corner, crossed a backyard (carefully skirting a noisome midden), and turned onto White Church Lane. He drew his coat tight, concealing his webbing vest and twin Glock 18s. Boots
